Hi. For those who don't know me, I'm Quote, and I am a huge proponent of increased job complexity in Final Fantasy XIV. In the wake of Forked Tower's release and the discussion surrounding its difficulty and player disappointment, I've had a few thoughts that I wanted to share about it. I know I'm a little bit late to the party, but I'll have to settle for that since I lost forum access due to being unsubbed. Better late than never, right?

To preface, I think it's important to establish exactly why job complexity is so important. I've made a few posts (links here!) on the topic before, if you care to read them, but the general tl;dr gist is this: Jobs having greater depth like they did in HW or SB-era XIV provides a lot more longevity for both general casual gameplay and for raiders. In the former case, individual jobs will take much more time to fully optimize and master, creating both skill progression and extrinsic motivation to keep playing for however many hours mastery takes. In the latter case, raids will be more evergreen when greater gameplay variance exists between different jobs and greater room for self-improvement exists on individual jobs. If this quick explanation leaves you unsatisfied, I encourage you to read each of the posts linked at the beginning of this paragraph for more detailed write-ups that might do a better job at convincing you.

Okay, so what does this have to do with difficulty? And more specifically, Forked Tower? Well, the developers have gone on record before stating that job complexity and mechanical difficulty are supposed to correlate: if overall difficulty is a balance between the two, then the easier jobs become, the harder raids will need to become to compensate. I think this has affected the game more than people realize, and will continue to do so until jobs are fundamentally changed to make the balance between the two more even again. If a given piece of content is 'easy' and jobs are also easy, then it makes the content unfulfilling. Dungeons make a solid example, because most people probably find them highly uninteresting and boring (if you like them or find them hard, then that's great!). More importantly, however, if the developers are operating with this dynamic in mind, then it explains why content releases feel 'unbalanced' and lopsided towards high-end raiders. Anything created with the intention of being 'easy' has an inherently short shelf life because simple jobs can't create meaningful or interesting ways to interact with the content in question, and that in turn likely causes the developers to gravitate towards producing higher end content that has greater longevity.

In other words, the whole 'casual vs. hardcore' argument isn't as simple as the developers catering to one demographic over the other; it's just the natural byproduct of unengaging jobs that content will naturally shift 'up' in difficulty to compensate. To me, Occult Crescent is the worst of both worlds because the casual overworld grinding is much too tedious and boring due to individual job gameplay being weak, but the endgame Forked Tower content is also too 'hardcore' and asks too much in requiring external organization to even access reliably — the balance of job complexity and difficulty is completely off. One end is dull, and the other is inaccessible.

How do we fix the problem? Reintroduce greater job complexity, and finding the middle ground becomes much easier. Casual or 'easy' content will become much more tolerable for advanced players if they have a lot of spinning plates or job mechanics to engage with to distract them from simple mechanics, and raids can also shift away from the "DDR" approach that many seem to dislike because more focus can be placed on managing job mechanics instead of fast-paced 'dance' movements. If you like Eureka's Logograms or Bozja's Lost Actions over OC's Phantom Job system, then you can extrapolate that thinking to how FFXIV's jobs function and hopefully appreciate how greater depth makes for a much more entertaining and dynamic gameplay experience. 'Hard' jobs is not the end goal. Engaging jobs, though, open up the design space a lot.

If this resonates with you at all, please consider making your voice heard for the promised 8.0 job revamp by asking for greater depth in our gameplay while you have the chance.